Gordon and Breckenridge and Ramseur and Rodes, with Fitz Lee’s cavalry sent up from Tidewater, all camped for a time beside the Opequon. The stream ran with an inner voice, an autumn colouring was on the land. “But it isn’t bright,” said the men, “it isn’t bright like it was that fall!”—“Isn’t time yet for it to be bright. Bright in October.”—“Yes, of course—but that fall it was bright all the time! The seasons are changing anyhow.”—“What’s that the Bible student’s saying? ‘_The lean kine and the lean ears of corn_—’” Opequon flowed on, brown and clear, but much of the woodland by Opequon had been hewed away, and the bordering lands were not now under cultivation. All were bare and sorrowful. There were no cattle, no stock of any kind. The leaves turned red and the leaves turned yellow and the wind murmured through the hacked and hewed forest, and the nights were growing chill. “Do you remember,” said the men, “the day that Heros von Borcke brought Old Jack the new uniform from Jeb Stuart?”—“Do you remember the revival here?” “We’re tenting to-night on the old camp-ground. Give us a song to cheer—” The seventeenth and eighteenth all divisions moved nearer to Winchester. The nineteenth the battle of Winchester had its moment in time,—a battle very fortunate for the Confederates early in the day, not at all so fortunate later in the day,—a fierce, dramatic battle, in which the blue cavalry played the lion’s part,—blue cavalry very different, under Sheridan in ’64, from the untrained and weakly handled blue cavalry of the earlier years,—a battle in which Rodes was killed and Fitzhugh Lee wounded, in which killed and wounded and missing the blue lost upward of five thousand, and in killed and wounded and captured the grey lost as many—a bitter battle!